And Soon Your Grief Will Turn Into Joy (John 16:20)

Do you ever feel in the background? Whether it be a social situation, at work, with your own family and friends, or even to God's masterful plan?

How I feel right about now. It's been only one agonizing, short, insanely long, painful, torturous month since Padre left. She left. She left me. She left my siblings. She left my precious dad. She left her puppies. She left her church. She left this world. I am mad. I am so angry at God and I'm alright with admitting and sharing that emotion- hopefully someone else will take comfort in knowing they are not the only one to feel such a way. I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much. I can sit here and go on and on about how this was "God's plan" and His "timing is perfect", but I don't really feel like it... and I don't want this to turn into an angry post (and we all know how blunt I can be). So, the best way to describe how I feel is being in the background. I don't know what's going on or why it's happening(ed). I'm just watching it all take place. Screaming in silence. In the background. Helpless. Watching.

I went back into my devotional book to read the lesson on the day my mom died, April 24th. What would you have it the lesson is on faith and worry. I have little faith and I have a lot of worry- how appropriate.

My mom wrote us each a letter about a month and a half before she died. She hid them away in the bottom of a book bag that, by chance, I found so close to her passing. She told me to slow down and breathe. She told me how proud she was of me and how much she loved me and to trust God with my life. She told me it did no one any good by the amount of pressure I put on myself and the worry that ultimately overtakes me. She had also mentioned in her journal, that if her cancer brought her children closer to Christ, then it was all worth it.

What a sacrificial way of thinking... a mother's way of thinking.

I don't know when my grief will turn into joy. I don't know when I'm going to finally pray that prayer of faith and be able to walk away feeling weightless and truly casting all my anxieties onto the Lord. I don't know when I will be accepting of the idea of her leaving or the actual reality of her being gone. I may also never see this side of heaven why she left.

Until I am able to turn my grief into joy...

Faith is being... certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1)

I do know one thing- my mom is in heaven rejoicing at the foot of the throne of the One who promised us that through Him, we will spend eternity together. So until He returns or calls ME home, here in the power of Christ I'll stand. Because only THROUGH HIM am I made strong, and then my mom's prayers will have been answered.